The various embodiments described herein relate to a mail processing system and a method of delivering articles to delivery locations within the mail processing system.
Each day the United States Postal Service (USPS) processes articles for delivery to millions of individual domestic addresses. As used throughout the application, articles refer to mail items, magazines, books and other such flat items. Before mail carriers begin to walk through or drive through their delivery routes, a mail processing system at a USPS processing site sorts all articles for the carriers and packages the sorted articles for each domestic address. A carrier's responsibility includes putting all of these articles into an appropriate sequence for efficient delivery to the domestic addresses.
The mail processing system is highly automated to handle the amount of daily articles. It includes a delivery point packaging (DPP) system that, for example, separates the articles, reads their destination addresses and groups the articles based upon their respective destination addresses. One example of a DPP system includes an arrangement of a multitude of individual pockets or slots for individual articles. A transport system transports the articles along a track system to the slots. Feeders insert the articles into the transport system at loading points. At this point, the destination address of an article is known and the transport system transports the article along a delivery path to a slot that is pre-assigned to the destination address of that article.